i think it is one of the biggest issues in the country today so i will be continuing to write about this. >> agreed. we've been speaking with paul cuadros, author of quote coach had a home championship team provide hope for another tom." >> thank you book tv. did you know you can view booktv programs online? go to booktv.org. titanium of the author, book or subjected to the left-hand cornf the page. select the watch link. now you can view the entire program. you might also explore the recently on booktv boxaturedgrad and a few recent and featured programs. next, walter metzl dee dee kozinski of the aspen institute and author of biographies of

albert einstein and benjamin franklin discuss his book of essays. mr. isaacson's writings include ofiles of world war leaders, his thoughts on journalism and reports on his home town, new orleans. it is just over one hour. >> good evening. i am barbara mead, owners of politics and prose and i know we are going to have a good evening tonight because this as i think the fourth time that walter isaacson has been to politics and prose, and every time it's been an interesting evening. he was here for his biographies of kissinger, benjamin franklin and eleanor weinstein -- elbra neinstein to read in the past he has been the chairman and ceo of cnn and the managing editor of time, and then i just actually read this this afternoon. in november this past month a couple of weeks ago he was nominated by president obama to

be the chairman of the broadcasting board of governors and that is a body that runs the place of america, radio free europe and other international broadcasts run by our government. what i felt was a really engaging introduction to american sketches walter isaacson shares the dr. she has had since his youth in new orleans to become a great writer. he was in a place he was soaking up the atmosphere of tennessee williams and william faulkner but he was also a very good friend of walter percy for many years until walter percy's death. before he went off to be a rhodes scholar the summer before, he was still on his

great writer mission and offered a job as a summer intern by "the washington post" and he turned it down. he turned it down to become a stevedore on a derrick barge on the mississippi and the reason this was part of his great writer quest he felt that in doing so he could encounter so many crews of so many colorful characters that he could write a novel would be a serious contender to huckleberry finn. mark twain was the one he was trying to knock down. well, still, it didn't happen. but in his drawer, he says in his desk drawer their lies a manuscript still unfinished about the happenings on derrick

barge on the mississippi. there is a captain coone, his name is, and i think this is as we have walter here this evening we ought to commit to him if he'd just get out that manuscript and polished off we will all come to hear you read from your book. what his -- i feel his new book american sketches is all about is a personal quest, but i felt that it was very much like quest or the mission of the aspen institute, of which he is the president and ceo, and part of that mission is that in certain points of life's many of us feels the need to reflect what it takes to lead a life as good, useful, worthy and meaningful.

we passed through a program in the 1990's when we saw the consequences in both the business and personal arena of becoming unhinged from our underlying values, so in america this is what is at the heart of american sketches. this quest to discover whether or in the lives of some dozen people included in this book that has allowed them to be such successes in life, and not surprisingly it's not of some intelligence. what he finds is that all these individuals had such mammoth curiosity the just consumed their imagination and creative abilities and that was what the special gifts they brought to the world serious altar isaacson

to talk about his book. [applause] >> thank you very much, barbara. it's great to be back in my favorite bookstore here, and especially with you with that wonderful introduction. it is funny to hear the talk about being a real writer. i was asked to do something once for the "washington post" page you might know called the riding of life. i wrote something to my daughter, who was then 13 and spent a lot of time in this store, and she was truly an aspiring novelist and said to me "dad, you're not a real writer, you are just a journalist and a biographer." [laughter] and to that i plead guilty. as much as i did have that yearning wants to be a real writer i began to see what a glorious it was to have the joy of being a journalist and writer because what you get to do is follow people, understand how they act and how they affect the

tenor of our time. henry who founded the magazine of time magazine plus accused because he always did biographical portrait on the cover of sort of indulging in personal the journalism and he said "time" magazine. the bible did. that is how we tell stories that have meaning. that is how we try to convey the lessons of our time. so as barbara said, i've always tried to be interested in creative people. if you're in this bookstore, if you're in this town you know a lot of smart people. i'm not sure this is working. it is? okay. people in the back -- you know a whole lot smarter people and you kind of realize after a while smart people are a dime a dozen and don't often amount to much. what does matter is creative people. people who can think out of the

box, come up with something new. so in this book i try to look at very smart people and figure out how have to have a moral center, how they had to think differently, how they had to be creative. ford said, in 1905 all of the smartest physicists in europe were trying to figure out why the speed of light seemed constant. sorry. there were a lot of people smarter than albert einstein in terms of their learning and knowledge. there is max blanka kuhl all working on this problem. einstein was a third class patent club working at the swiss patent office. but in his spare time he realized that the speed of light is always constant but as you try to keep up with the speed of light, slows down for you.

it was an amazing leap of imagination and active creativity that was done by a patent clerk and not by a professional scientist. in fact it took another five years before he even got a job as an academic scientist because that is how long it took the scientific community to figure out the sleep of a imagination. and so whether it is henry kissinger or hillary clinton or bill clinton were benjamin franklin or ronald reagan, i have always tried as a journalist to look at what made somebody stand out. why did they have a special characteristic that made them different from the people around them. as barbara said i got inspired by the first real writer i ever knew, walter percy and i hope his books are still here because i will tell you that i marvel at his philosophical grace and his understated way to every time i pulled down the copies of the moviegoer or the last gentleman

from myself. he was the uncle of my best friend, a guy named tom, we were young we used to go across the lake from new orleans and go fishing and turtle hunting and waterskiing uncle walker's house. i said what did your dad to? he was at home all day and she said well, you know, he was a doctor but he never practiced. that is why he was called dr. percy in town but he stayed at home. only a few years later after the moviegoer had finally become famous, did i realize that being a writer was something you could do for a living just like being a doctor or an engineer or fisherman or anything else. i said that's really cool, and as barbara said i was growing up in new orleans. i started hunting the french

quarter bars and william faulkner and anderson and tennessee williams, and i would keep a journal in the corner table with the cappoli in house. i would save from those pretensions partly by journalism. i finally was able to get a job at times at a very early police headquarters starting at 5 a.m. has a summer job and i realized even though i might never write the great american novel i was addicted to the notion of storytelling. that was another thing that walter percy taught me because after thumbing through his novels and realizing this is a real writer he would put up with my earnest questioning. i would talk to him some and sort of began to notice there were messages and his wonderful tales. a message in a bottle sort of thing and he russell to become philosophical messages, sometimes religious messages, so i would ask about these messages

and that seems to try to do in the story and he wouldn't really talk about it much. he said there were two types of people who can out of louisiana. preachers and storytellers. he said for goodness sake be a storyteller. [laughter] once again it was the way the bible does it. parts of the bible that work of the wonderful story tales, stories that tell you the moral lessons in a subtle way. after all it is one of the great needs of all time in the beginning and it tells you the power of colonel lescol storytelling. so that is what dr. percy taught me. so as a journalist i was able to just tell tales. i remember the first day i was on the job and i had the worst of all possible stories you could be assigned to cover. it was the murder of a very small child. i went to carrollton avenue and was there with the police, got all the things and this was the day before blackberrys and e-mails and seóul phones -- cell

phones. i went to the corner drugstore and put in eight time to diner. the guy i called was billy iranian after dictated what i had he said what did the parents say. i said i didn't talk to the parents. he said go back and knock on the door and talk to the parents. i was appalled at that notion. but i bent, knocked on the door and i discovered the next lesson of writing and journalism which is people want to talk and i got invited income they wanted to show me the albums and they kept talking on and on about how wonderful this baby girl was and as they did so i realized this was part of the transaction of the storytelling and journalism. at one point the woman touched me on the knee and said i hope you don't mind me telling you all of this. i was reminded of that many years later i was at "time"

magazine and woody allen had just gotten into that per fossil by having dated mia farroe's bader and was a scandal. the phone rings at "time" magazine where i was and is woody allen who i didn't really know saying cut like a lover he wanted to give an interview. i went over to his apartment and was just woody allen and myself sitting there and he wanted to talk. this was not what you'd call a very good idea on his part but he talked for hours and actually said something that became a pretty famous phrase because when i asked him how could he do it he said the heart wants what it wants and that became one of the quotations that this scandal was known by, but he, too, touched me on the need halfway through and said i hope you don't mind me telling you all of this. it felt a bit like woody allen's psychiatrist which is no this is

what i do for a living. i get paid for this. but it was the great lesson of journalism as one of the reasons we have merited stories is that people like to tell and like to work out the moral lessons and everything else through the stories. when i was working on the times i tried to prove myself every now and then i would pick a city, a town, village at random in louisiana and just show up and say i'm going to find a story. at one point i went to louisiana in the sugarcane country and did a series of stories on the sugarcane workers and i realized what a rich there to tell it was. at this point i was still a last in my writer's days and i had read james once too often so i felt the stories read a little too much with literary pretensions but they were useful

in getting the next stage of my life. i had gone to college and read somebody's book to ensure you have up front right now and is still a friend of mine, harry evans. he was then the young crusading editor of the sunday times of london. some of you know him now, his memoir has just come out and harry came to speak at my college and he said that american journalists have gotten away from the great old narrative traditions of journalists so without any pretense of humility, i sent off my sugarcane stories from the times picayune to him in london and in virtually didn't hear anything, never heard anything back. ..

he was really, really fan, really tall, always tightly coiled, so much so that he looked like a figure in an animated cartoon your. he would unfurl himself in various ways. i was sent by harry as and while i was there in london to a town called dundee scotland. he was under the theory that terri had that i was an american, this was night teen 73 and since i was an american i

was like woodward and bernstein would suddenly become famous, uncovering watergate. this is not true because one of the things about writing about people the way ideal is that you do it because you tend to like people. this is great for writing biographies. it's really bad for being an investigative journalist because he totally sympathize with whoever you're writing about. so i'm out there in dundee, scotland, and there is very mayor who is the lord provost he was called in my family and covered the story that had all sorts of land shenanigans and buying the land and rezoning at the very mysterious murder. and i write this story and harry is so baffled by it he says david monday to report it with me. i was kind of embarrassed because i was really part to be that after i got in the airport in dundee, gone to the the counter to get a car to go to my sunday times credentials and i was told i was not ordered not to rent a car. so i've been headshaking around

without telling my editor that i haven't been able to rent a car. so finally blondie gets a card we get back to the hotel and the hotel clerk says, by the way, somebodies in your room. all of a sudden, blundy totally unfolds his great height and just assumed by the lord provost. so he turns to me that you take the elevator, i'll take the stairs. the point of this totally eluded me, but i took the elevator. we get there to the fifth floor at about the same time, barge into the room, david arches and, he was a chain smoker so he immediately collapses and starts wheezing and this poor guy who is a television repairman is there in the room and scatters out with the tv still all in parts. but david taught me the notion of just getting out in the world. how important a plus as a storyteller to be there in leading people. i was in belfast with a month.

we were at the europa hotel. it was a tuesday and there was a demonstration going on, a street parade. the sunday times as you can only comes out once a week on sunday. there's really no time to be covering the demonstration on a tuesday. but david said we had to get out there. as a defect in a dangerous and he said no, no, he said you get there's a lot of violence but if you're a block away or half a block away the people standing there watching and you really get the story. and while we were out, a bomb actually went off in the europa hotel near the bar where i was to be content and sitting. he said let that be a lesson to you. so it always was sort of a lesson to me until davidow some of you know got shot by the sniper's bullet and killed while covering all followed her. as i never quite figured out the full import of what that lesson was supposed to be. distance on the sunday times

helps me get a rhodes scholarship as you mentioned. i was not actually the best grade or the best student. i had two advantages. one was they came from louisiana and they had to give a road to be blown louisiana every now and then in second i had my lanza the newspaper. as he could imagine, the people on selection committee are overly impressed i people who bylines in english newspapers. they tend to be anglophiles. and so, i got the fellowship. i was checking oysters at a bar across the street from felix is in new orleans at the time, which was convenient because the interviews with the hotel because nobody at this moisture bar had any idea what he wrote scholarship was so a company for being nervous. but i do remember i did get nervous because i was still vaguely in my real writers face when i relies on the piano was

willie morris. he was a great southern writer. i was totally intimidated by him. i told that tale years later and bill clinton of all people said to me, no, you don't remember who else is on your panel. i was on your panel. last night i was the one who asked if he were in a boat and only three people can survive, one of those type of questions. bill clinton had an amazing, amazing memory. he is just a lawyer in little rock who ran and lost the race in congress. he really in certain ways has dogged me throughout my career. i got to oxford and i'm one of the most amazing professors i've ever had. my advisor there. a guy named dr. paul chomsky. and dr. paul chomsky taught philosophy and politics in early on in one of our sessions he assigned me to write a paper on

how democratic tendencies are reflected in a a search area and regimes. he said this is not really that good of a paper. i said, sorry, sir. he said i'm going to give you a copy of the paper that somebody wrote a few years before you and you may know who he is. and i looked at the name and i said no, i've never heard of him. he said while you're from louisiana to? i said yes, sir. this person is from arkansas so you must know him. last night i must admit i was annoyed enough at the time that i allowed -- not only did i not know him but i do not know anybody from arkansas and never have known anybody from arkansas ever. but i did read the paper and it was called democracy in the soviet union a bill clinton. countably forgot about it. years later and here in washington, washington bureau, working at "time" magazine so

editor coming back and forth. i get a phone call from the.your andy says, david manners, some of you may know him great, is calling me and wants to interview me for the "washington post" about bill clinton. i said, well that's great. any such elegant enough paper? i forgotten all about the paper. so i thought real quickly about democracy in russia and remember enough paper, some of the stick out of context and frankly sentences taken in context would not have been too good to her and not campaign in which republicans were already criticized for even gone to russia. and i realized this would derail his campaign by russia is really a democracy, his paper had come out. so i'm hit with that moral dilemma of do i tell this nice,

wonderful pseudo- professor jeff, give up that paper to the reporter. so finally i said, dr. paul chomsky i don't know what you should do however if you were my paper i preferred that she left me first. and so fortunately he says, yes you're right. i'll ask them. i'll ask clinton before i give it out. that result when dilemma but then i had another to l-lima which is i still thought i might have a copy of this paper and i was at "time" magazine and it would be a great scoop. [laughter] so i call home and get my dad on the phone when i say dad, can you go to the basement, by the workshop behind the table saw, there's a white chest of drawers, with all my papers from oxford. go in there and keep you can find a paper from bill clinton -- by bill clinton. and that's a sure, i'll do it in a call you back. i said no, i'm going to hold on. he comes back quite upset because even before katrina we use to flood all the time.

the basement has flooded a few times and assorted destroyed those things in your mother throughout all those papers. i was actually secretly release because i didn't know what i would do if i had a paper in my hand that would derail the candidacy of bill clinton. kathy, my wife and i., when years later to see 52 in retirement and he pulls out a scrapbook and there is a paper there's also -- does anybody know who betsey wright was like she was in charge of bimbo eruptions, damage control. there's a telegram that he got from betsey wright saying, do not release paper. let her to follow. i tell him he should send the paper, which he did to the clinton library because i believe those of us who are historians should at least have the right to that paper even if it would was a journalist during that time is a good idea not to. i made my way back to new

orleans in the paper and the one thing that was going to take me away from being the writing life of a so-called writing life of my daughter put a was when i got a call from fort myer. she had been in a serious person in the british embassy -- the american embassy in london, gotten to know a lot of oxford students. he wanted to visit me at this point pull at the airport hilton hotel in new orleans. as those of you know, if you've heard of them, he was actually a cia station chief and then head of operations at the cia. so he tried to talk me into coming to the cia. the conversation didn't go well because halfway through that of course we don't want you to be an agent here we don't want to be a covert agent. we want to be an analyst at headquarters. i have sort of thought this dashing covert agent and suddenly my hopes are dashed which is you want me to actually

analyze papers at headquarters. fortunately that the very same week there've been a senior editor at "time" magazine who i don't think was doing a whole lot. it was the days before they are playoffs so they sent the senior editor on a trip around america because they have decided they needed to find riders from as they put it, out there, to go to "time" magazine. this guide spent a whole year finding writers out there. fortunately he got two more lands just when i had finished writing about the mayor's race we had back then, right after he was retiring and i've been promoted from police headquarters to city hall by this point. and there were 12 people running for mayor of new orleans. it was a wonderfully colorful race. in fact, if you go down the street to see the steak house founded by women named ruth for towel in new orleans. her husband run a fatah was one of the mayors and were a gorilla every experience because of a

his only platform is getting a gorilla for the auburn park zoo. it went in every precinct chairman and every word later in every bar in part is sitting at the time you time you are pleasing go. him in the percentages and we'll out. i was just sort of taking a flyer in my column before the race happened. here's how it's going to turn out. here's the order they're going to finish and here's the percentages they're going to get. well, it turned out probably out of luck and partly out of smarts of all these precinct captains to be just right. so they're counting is just as this guy is trying to recruit people to go to "time" magazine. i went home and told my mother i was being asked to go to "time" magazine or the cia. she had strong opinions. i ended up going to "time" magazine. read before i left arrow by very final column which was for the run up in the's race. i have this new job, figured i knew everything, was full of myself, didn't see or precinct

leader, just protocol and seeing who is going to win. i got that one bromwich also taught me a lesson. when i finally got to "time" magazine, they bring me up to the 34th floor because i was the only person from out there that this guy had found here so they bring it to see hedley, some of you may know him. he was a truly distinguished gentleman. two or three editors further including this guy out there and i get presented to hedley donovan and the office of the "time" magazine, slightly larger than this room, with huge white carpeting as far as the eye can see. and hedley donovan says i'm so glad we found somebody from out there because everybody so far we seem to have hired, seems to be from harvard and oxford. so i laughed, thinking he's making a joke.

he says, where did you go to college? i laughed again, thinking he's making a joke. all of a sudden jason who had brought me up sort of nervously as the genie. so i kind of sad, harvard, but i made it sound like auburn. and he actually from then i never brought me to see hedley donovan again, but i think he thought for the rest of time that i've gone to auburn. [laughter] one of the things we try to do because of that was when i became editor of "time" magazine it was true that you get isolated as a journalist, especially in the state capitol. so we used to get a greyhound bus and drive route 50 across america, stopping at pta meetings and town halls and bowling alleys and rotary club practice, so that people could get a sense on really what was on people's minds. the last trip we took instead of doing the bus trip, we rented something that always wanted to do, a boat and went from panama

missouri and went down to new orleans. while i was at "time" magazine, it's rarely got bitten by the notion of covering people, but also about the possibility of writing books. otto friedrich was my senior editor. a wonderful old man with a bushy red mustache who is totally and always and constantly amused by himself. he just walked around, sort of smiling. [laughter] and he wrote books on the side. i said i get it, this is really cool. this is a weekly magazine so we can sit here and write books four days a week and write the article on friday. i was trained to figure out the key to all things. and so i've been put on the reagan campaign in 1980 and i kind of noticed that rallies would lead to the fringes of the rallies were always these people handing out leaflets and

pamphlets that talked about the establishment and the elite and there was always the trilateral commission and the dotted lines and the council on foreign relations in our little circles and all that. and i was at east coast establishment with the rockefellers and everybody else was totally controlling everything. i was totally baffled by this. the one of my close friends went on to college with him now was at time magazine which was evan thomas of this town. and under the theory that i've been with the east coast preppy and i was from louisiana, he would understand it. i started asking him about the establishment. why do we read a book about the east coast establishment? at first we were doing a morpheus book about the east coast establishment, but what i said about the lessons of always tell it to people, great characters. we decided to just take six people who were at the core of

what was supposedly the american establishment. and evan and i were at a house with zach harbour and he was in early morning and i'm a late night person towards it until 5:00 a.m. sketching these various characters and then handed over to him when he got up at 5:00 a.m. and then we do to the beach in the afternoon. it was about six friends and how the intersected in life and became part of the establishment. we brought it down the street to a woman who had been clay fulcher's secretary at the magazine and was just becoming an agent and is now a super agent or an uber agent, or whatever it may. she set up her new down the street further to alice mayfield was an editor at time in massachusetts. we got halfway there a preservative page and often interrupts the spirit she is very impatient and just said yes, yes i've always wanted to do the book and i've always wanted to call it the wise men.

and that's how we wrote her first book when we're in our early twenties and it was a book about the wise men of the american political establishment. particularly interesting because matt bundy, who we interviewed and i have a sketch of him in the thought that someone was far too smart. if you then have to smart and twice as wide as he would've been a great man. he was a little bit too smart. but matt bundy said, there's no such thing as the establishment. we went down to the archives at the lyndon johnston library and there was this wonderful memo from matt bundy that we started about by saying there's no such thing as the establishment, bundy says and make this argument and then there's this memo that wendy had written called backing from the establishment. it was a memo to johnson about how you had to get the establishment on your side about in the vietnam war. he said the key to these people as john mccoy which is one of the characters in her book and said we should convene them

together and we can dump them the wise man and will do whatever we want. so that's the joy of the documents and interviewing, which is, you know, the way a journalist tries to take on history. it was helpful when i did henry kissinger because every time i looked at the memos and the documents, they seemed rather misleading into winston lloyd told me if you work for henry, you write in three versions of every memo. one is for the files in this totally untrue. one is for nixon and has a particular slant and one is for henry's personal file and that's where we tell the real story. so trying to get out the right document i did ask dr. kissinger about this. he said yes, if i had known now what i know about the documents, i could never have written a dissertation on metternich using just documents. i now realize that documents have to be supplemented by talking to the real people. by kissinger was a true believer

that it was people, that narrative tales told to people which was a thing of this book was important. he was once on a shuttle mission in 1974 between syria and israel, shuttling back and forth. he said to the people on a spring, when i was a professor used to think great forces shaped history. but now that i see it up close, i see the importance of real people in the process. and so, to me it was looking at the personality of a henry kissinger. his brilliant feminist attachment from some of the moral strands that underlie american foreign policy that made me want to write about him. he was not exactly thrilled with my book. the day she read it, right as it was coming out with our reviewed coffee, i got seven letters in the face of eight hours, hand delivered to me at the time life

building as henry kissinger in a rage would dictate a letter saying it's absolutely outrageous that you would link that i have less than total respect for gerald ford's intelligence or something like that. and the poor aide to henry kissinger had you come to the time life building i would go down to get each new letter. the aid was jerry bremmer who ended up becoming our viceroy anorak. we still joke about it. he told me that being the viceroy anorak was only a little bit less difficult than being henry kissinger's personal assistant. bissinger didn't speak to me for quite a while. he was furious. when i became editor of time, we invited for the 75th anniversary all people who had been on the cover of time to come back to a party. and i was wondering whether he would come thundering to my office and my assistant says it can be kissinger.

he says well, walter -- my first reaction is this is if they are henry kissinger or someone doing henry kissinger's accent. i can't fall for this. i just have to not saying anything. and kissinger said, even a hundred years war have to admit and at some point. i will come to your party. people in nations that have been permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. that said, having gone through the process with dr. kissinger, i decided next time around to write about somebody who had been dead for 200 years. that was dr. franklin. i wanted to read about the realism and american foreign policy because kissinger, for all of this controversy that he wrote, was the greatest we list or realpolitik thinker, understanding balance of power, understanding the forces of

influence, not been caught up by sentimentality or emotional assemblages figuring out national interest. the only person who did a equally well as benjamin franklin, who was her envoy in paris, was able to do the quintessential great american theme when american foreign policy works which is two we then interest with idealism. so besides writing these wonderful tracks that think they did when he built himself a printing press in paris him he wrote these tracks about liberty in america, printed the declaration of independence and other great tracks that come out. he wrote many letters to the french foreign minister. why france and spain should come in the netherlands in a revolution and he was a great triumph of realism. i also discovered that benjamin franklin was a wonderful scientist, totally interested in

science. in the would've thought people were philistines that they weren't interested in science. you know, we think of msm old dude playing the kite and the pain that those electricity use of the most important kind of experiments of the time and the single fluid. electricity was the most important scientific purity of that. after newton's theory of gravity. and it occurred to me that people in our generation, who are not scientists, sometimes just flinch from science. we would be what franklin called the philistines. we don't keep up with all the advances in science. in fact, we have friends who would never admit to knowing the difference regime hamlet and shakespeare i mean hamlet and macbeth or not though the difference between four shakespeare plays, but they would happily brag almost that they don't know the difference between a gene in a chromosome or uncertainty principle and relativity theory. so i so much you say science is just as magical, just as interesting.

we can although the just as we can let shakespeare, which is difficult or shouldn't he who is difficult do it three person and so obviously i didn't albert einstein. my daughter, interweave them, i start with your wisdom in the back and end with it although on the right appear tonight we were talking about what an idiot she is on a couple things that happened, breaking her computer, losing things, that sort of thing. all biography is autobiography and she told me that. i said yes, because writing about benjamin franklin is writing about an idealized version of myself. somebody with a printer, a journalist, a newspaper person, a social network or, a sort of strieber in the meritocracy. and i could relate to them franklyn, an entrepreneur who wanted to be part of a media world. so i said to betsy, what was i

doing when i read about einstein? she said you were writing about your father. which is true, my father was an engineer, lead science, sort of a secular jewish humanist, wonderful person and just as einstein was his hero, my father has been my hero. as i said yeah, that makes sense. was i doing when i was writing about kissinger? she said well done, you were writing about your dark side. [laughter] all of my careers i've always been interested in the world of tech knowledge a. i was once -- and technology is changing the way we do narrative storytelling. it was a wonderful, wonderful to knowledge e4 narratives. electronic media is a great for narrative. you hop around, it's a web. you jump around and gather information like a hunter and gatherer as opposed to sitting

around the fireplace saying, let me make a narrative. that is why, i think, in the future, electronic media will always coexist with paper. i think we will someday realize that paper is an awesomely good technology and as much as we admire electronic ways of getting information, if we had been getting information electronically for 400 years on screens and some latter-day guttenberg had come along and that i can take all his beautiful pictures and put them on page and put it together and delivered to your doorstep and you could take it into the back yard or the bathtub on the bus coming you'd say wow, paper, that's a great new technology that will replace the internet someday. [laughter] i think i will be able to use digital and electronic technology to do all sorts of things. i hope my next book combine music and words, as you're

reading you will see things that will come up from the page. but i also know that the narrative will always work better in book form. during the early 1990's, i was very involved at the beginning of a new media age, even before the invention of the world wide web. we had american prodigy and compuserve and we would take the magazine not dump it on aol or prodigy, that would make deals with aol that we would form communities, social networks. on everything from politics to house, journalism would be there for some of the journalists and would have chat rooms and discussions and bulletin boards. and i was a sense of community and we got paid for it. aol would bet a million dollars at the end of year to say okay, but your sales on aol so we could draw traffic to them. compuserve would match it or go higher. and each year we were making by creating communities online. on the world wide web came along

and in some ways it was bad. because a couple things happen. first of all, on the web is that while this is great were not in this garden of this online service. we can control everything we do. so we took the entire magazine and put it online. but we'll let people drive by and certified with the magazine. we were creating a community. at the very most of the sort of a comments section may be at the end of an article, but nobody did that. it is came by, read the magazine, and then moved on. so we lost the notion of community. the good thing is that is changed back, just in the past five years, social media, social networking, youtube, twitter, facebook, myspace, the notion of creating communities around ideas and content has come back. but the other thing we did when we do everything online as we ascend that we would subscribe to it just like you did anything

else. but as soon as we did it, at wired magazine, time magazines, other places, we created the banner ads and suddenly people from madison avenue are making a four block walk to us on sixth avenue was satchels of tax money to dump on our desk and say we want to be part of this new thing. so we decided to make it advertising only supported and not charge people, not have subscriptions we thought just by getting a lot of traffic would be about to succeed with an advertising only model. one of henry luce is other great odd was that if you're creating a publication fully for advertisers coming or not only doing something that's morally a point, it's also economically self-defeating. you have to behold more to your users, to your readers into your advertisers. and we got away from that what we thought everything had to be free. we kept quoting the mantra that information wants to be free without quoting the second half of it which is information also

wants to be expensive because there is nothing more valuable than the right information at this time and the information age. so i do think that the great challenge, facing print, facing books, facing journalism is how will the creators of content be paid? i'm not talking about journalists, they're on the first wave of been decimated because the first line is evil creating music. in the digital age, you can copy anything, music, story, sunday evening at the end you can make hundreds of thousands of copies of the marginal cost is virtually zero so it can be disseminated all around. this is not dead as a business model for people who want to create content and get paid for it. or 300 years ever since the statue demand was established in britain, people who created something, an idea, piece of

music, piece of art, a photograph, eternal, a book. if they got copied, they had to write the profits of the copy. that's why it is called copyright. in the digital age, what frightens me most is that notion that you can create content and get paid for it in a digital brown that sort of disappeared in the bounds of music and everything else. if are going to have another 300 years of people creating things from people writing books, working for newspapers, harry evidence sending people to dundee. then somehow or another we have to get back to the fact that these people are not just going to do for the ego or for the fund, they have to pay the rent and put food on the table. we'll have to get back to a system or whether you are a musician or photographer or writer, people copy your work, you should make a little money for it. and so to me, i hope that i have had -- i know i have had a

really good time with the writing life. i really hope that the next generation will also have that ability with all the wonderful tools of the digital age, but also the ability to make a good living at the so-called writing life. thank you very much. [applause] >> okay, we have 20 minutes for questions and we've got are my chair in the middle because the c-span is here. >> can you hear me okay? >> yes, there's a microphone better. you go first and then dashed >> i would like to ask if there's anyone in public life today that she would compare to kissinger, someone who is a realist and thinks of our interests and is not sentimental? >> yes, there was a come back, you know, a new introduction in my kissinger biography because

it critical of him being too much of a realistic for not taking idealism and our values into account. but then somehow and both democrats and republicans we began a little bit to let them be the world and make a democracy and impose our values. i said we may need a dose of realism these days. the comeback of realism is led by people like colin powell, then scowcroft was the wise men of our time. and a lot of people who i think were cautious about some of our overseas adventurism, but understand that both our interests and our values have to be woven together. the fight to pick somebody and would say okay, what should we be doing on a big issue is, like a realist like colin powell would be doing in the first seven months. let me get to this gentleman and not repeat his question because he can't make it. >> you didn't mention in your

career, impressive career of writing, do you also were chair of elite of the commission looking into the stewards of vietnam, mainly asian art. >> is asking about the agent orange commission. i was too young to be drafted or a fight in vietnam, but obviously it's going very generation. and when the ford foundation and susan barrus and that many people said, vietnam is now one of our most natural allies, but there is one big stopping it. it's the fact that we left agent orange and we sprayed it all over and we haven't cleaned it up yet and we had forgotten about it. but every day their kids with with birth defects, there's fishermen who can't fish in the

legs because of the dioxin we laughed. this is where the aspen institute or other entities can come in. the american government could not easily admit all the blame for this and be liable for every birth defect or every possible, you know, illness or so in vietnam. but the american government wanted to do something. it couldn't do it directly so what we did is raise money from ford foundation, gates foundation and others. we cleaned up the dioxin and agent orange that was last at the airbase that contained it. the military has been good, the u.s. government under bush and now wonder obama has but two or 3 million each year to help with the cleanup. we said nobody has to admit fault. nobody has to say we are liable, but let's just clean it up like a good person would do if you've made a mess. and sometimes you just need practical solutions instead of

everybody getting on an ideological high horse. kathy and i went to vietnam maybe three years ago and saw the containment project, were helping out with rehabilitation centers because instead of just saying we are guilty, let's pay, you know, be sued for people or anyone who is a birth defects. creating rehabilitation centers and you can try to solve problems. yes, sir? >> or the extent of interviewing you have done through the years, what checks do you employ when interviewing that someone is not fabricating their story. >> well, that's the mark of old journalists and witches who is telling the truth and who isn't. we all in life after talk to people in some time are misled or not. there's always the two source will which is sometimes based on a witch you want to release get two different versions of a story whenever you can.

you also need documentation. i remember taking my first long interviews for the first book i ever did, the wise men. john mccoy, one of the most honorable people of all time. in john mccoy tells me the story of before they dropped the atom bomb, he in turn is the back row of a cabinet meeting with the assistant secretary of war and everybody is going along with it and he says and i get up and i say to the president, before we dropped the bomb, we should think about this. and it's just this great scene, you kind of want to write it. then you go back to the documents and he is told a story a few times before. frankly, like a lot of my stories and some of yours, it gets better each time. i finally got back to them telling it in 1949 to henry stimson, who has been in stimson's diaries it's not i got

up and told the president, it's afterwards i said and then i found the notes in the documents of the meeting as well as the diaries of the people in the meeting and mccoy hadn't really got nothing to do. i actually think he believes he did because over the years he kept telling it but afterwards he talked to a few people and they put together a way of looking at providing a warning to the emperor or letting the emperor's day. it was a kernel of truth to it but it was an embellished story. so you go back to the documents, ask other people, certainly i won't name names, but it's like when mac bundy tells you know there's no such thing as that of the many go back to the documents. they're certain people you feel are telling you the truth -- you know, i don't think i than this lead yet. yes, sir? [inaudible] >> thank you, mr. isaacson.

my question is not your praise for social networking which seems to me a little strange as a journalist of another generation, not necessarily mine. i'm wondering if you're afraid of the potential deleterious consequences of social networking, blogging, it under a is losing out on the visceral kind of connections that you made as a young journalist in louisiana, have been replaced by people that are maybe handy with google and have a pithy one-liner every now and then they failed to make the real human connection that you talked about in louisiana, et cetera. >> that's a good question with two parts. i don't consider blogging social networking because blogging is just another way of writing a column in publishing it, where he social is more user generated communities. but both kind of worry me. the worries and in particular,

cast some steam has a book about this called tiptoeing through trains. and it knowledge he in which they are -- thousands of possible places you can go for information. first of all, you're not going to make a lot of information blogging or social networking or whatever. so you're going to attend express opinions. and i'm not going to go to demand or be in helmand province. that takes a lot of money and a big organization. and so the lone blogger -- people say widely papers? we have journalists. if it hadn't been for a newspaper and magazine like "time" magazine i never would've gone to any of these places great you need an industrial organization that can help say okay will trade this journalists, will pay its way, will do things. so you lose out on reporting. what happens in the blogosphere and in the digital realm, including cable tv is when

there's hundreds of choice says, the way youract an audience is to be a little bit louder, more opinionated, more provocative than others. when i was going out -- to show how old i am, i remember a newscaster say and that's the way it is. i would be walter cronkite. for him to succeed yet to get at least a third of the population watch and appeared to succeed a cable tv now, whether it's fox news or anything else, you need to get maybe 2% of the nation washing, 3%. so what she do as you go after a hard-core audience who will be -- you know, who you can excite ideologically rather than getting a mass audience where you have this not offending of people. by offending people you can get the 5% or 10% that agree with you. you have a much more offensive

anti-domestic type of media. thirdly, even when i was at cnn, if we put on -- fox is pretty non-than opinionated talk shows. o'reilly was coming on, whatever. no matter how much you pay o'reilly or hannity is a lot cheaper paying a talk show format than having chris john of import in tehran or nic robertson in baghdad and doing the reported formatting. i still try to have reported news that cnn be the core of it with anderson cooper and aaron brown and many others. it is cheaper and it's easier to get a solid audience a laugh by having very strong opinionated talk shows. and that goes not just with cable tv but for the blogosphere as well. in the blogosphere, if you're pithy army you have this great

one-liners, you can get a following just as surely as if you were really courageous and scraped up all of your money and went and covered what's happening in helmand province now in afghanistan. so the worries me as well. what is the antidote to that? one of the antidotes is what i talk about at the end of the speech. if we have a system where people could pay for, not all-news comic is most news will still be free and generic, opinions will definitely be free because opinions proliferate on the web. but if high-quality journalism, people could get paid for it easily on the web economy would need a whole lot of people, 50 million people go to "new york times" website. if one 10th, 5 million paid $2 a month, that's more money than "the new york tim company. he could have a golden age of journalism is good reported journalism were valued and people would pay for it and we had a mindset in the system that allowed people to pay for it.

i do also think that we have to have a society that doesn't get quite as polarized, cable tv, talk radio, the internet has become polarizing because, you know, you try to get your cadre of true believers. and then people go into cul-de-sacs on the internet where their views have reinforced because they're just talking to them for cingular was neither own views and not a thing to people like walter cronkite. secondly, they go to their own end of the talk radio dial and their views get reinforced. but to me, these are all trends that need to be countered. but there is a deep desire and most americans i think for real news, reliable information and frankly for rational discourse. and in the end, and a free market if there is a demand for something, there will be that something. we just have to hope we can find a way to pay for it. thanks. i think we have one last gentleman here.

>> i love your book on einstein. thank you for that. >> is a really cool dude. >> recently i was watching c-span and there was a woman on named temple grandin and she said she is asked berger syndrome. and she said she has attitude she said i'm interested in your reaction. she said i find most certainly has aspergers syndrome. >> i do not think that those of us who are not nurse and even those of us who are can diagnose an 100 years later. i do think that einstein was very slow in learning how to stalk of a child, so slow his nickname in family was the dopey one because your side trouble. he didn't say verbally. so he saw it it in pictures. she was always doing what he

thought experiments in his head. i think you and i called daydreaming but if you are einstein needed to call them thought experiments. in the visual imagination allowed in to see the mathematical equations of the good boards brushstroke for painting something into reality. he could picture a concept. he could picture maxwell's equations and have informed the light waves and why no matter what you're doing that we will always travel at a certain speed. he pictured what happens when people are in motion to proceed lightning strike that one is in motion really fast and another is the other way. the lightning a simultaneous to one person will be simultaneous to the other and that's where you get relativity, which is time is relative, depending on your state of motion. all these things are visual thought experiments. the reason i say that is because if they did that for verbal learning ability was in a handicap, was in a disability, it was a different way of learning things. one of the things i've learned,

whether a, whether a look at bill gates who is very, very analytic, but is not sort of topping the scale and emotional intelligence or bill clinton is a little bit over the scale unemotional, you know, bonding. we are all very different. i'm only talk about our education system, and people are different. we don't a fairly need to label everything and categorize it to see different people are going to learn in different ways and there will be some disabilities, but also some abilities that come from each of those things. so whether or not he had add or asked bergeraspergers. it wasn't noticeably autistic. he had great relationships with family members. but whether or not that is that is part of what makes us all different. maybe someday they'll have chemicals and pills as

dr. walter percy would say in the last gentleman with his magnetometer that can take away all your quirks and now you're disabilities and carry you of being borderline aspergers or whatever. i'm not sure we would want those devices because then we wouldn't have great leaders and great heroes. thank you. [applause] >> okay, and other wonderful evening. if people would help if pull up the chairs. walter isaacson wilted appearance on copies. >> did you know you can view booktv programs online? go to booktv.org. type the name of the author, book or subject into the search area in the upper left-hand corner of the page.

program. you might also explore the recently on booktv box or the featured programs box to find programs. 17 years old. he was a purebred arab cross,

wonderful, wonderful horse. my mother bred horses. so i've always liked horses. i tend to get up around 6:30 and get on the website, jeffrey mike coeditor, jeffrey sinclair in oregon city puts the site up of the new material up by 7:30. so we clock in about 630 and discuss what stories might go up on the site. probably accumulate the mood of the previous day and talk about what's going on and what people are interested in and what the ev the jeffrey gets up between 6:30 and 8:00. i'm a morning guy anyways. i do columns. i do a column for the nation, the one i'd been doing since 1984. i do that every second tuesday to a syndicated column.

then, were usually working on a couple of bucks for "conterpunch" press. those are the bird, the dog, the cat, and the birds write everything for me. we try to keep quiet about that. what to write the column for me? sit down, sit down. sick, sick, good boy. you are miserable life a dog. want to give me the third chapter? some writers -- i like animals because they don't criticize. as soon as he stopped talking for a radio, they drown you out. so anyway, that takes me through the morning. editing for the "conterpunch" books were doing. two or three boat projects. but in the middle of all this because i like to garden and therefore says and i'm always

running around building things and so it kind of lets you forward to the day. this is a round of building which recalled the fact house which we put up about three or four years ago. it is a very old technique of putting earth down. i like thinking about things other than writing and i like to build. this is described building going into a dome by my friend and neighbor, greg smith. i don't like to write in the evening unless i have to do something for england and then of course england is eight hours from here forward and, you know, if you're going to get something on someone's desk right eight in the morning you can do it until late at night. so that's the shape of my day. it's not particularly monklike and in seclusion. i spent a lot of time gabbing on the telephone to three or four people up in olympia,

washington, who also do the editing on the books. our business operations are run right here by becky grant and dave the really other, incredible efficiency of coursee newspaper and web that we wanted to keep in more permanent form. it doesn't go away in a summer on the backside of mars in the vast black hole of the internet communications, probably up in some government archives, god help if people have to go through. we felt we wanted to put them in hard copy, again with the politics of anti-semitism because we did a whole bunch of articles about this idea if you're critical of israel, you're an anti-semite which is nonsense. we thought was important to have. was a very successful book actually. and we do our books in asat kk press, who

are a bunch of pretty well organized amicus down an oakland and be a case looks for a lot of bookshelf distribution. we also saw the book from our website, or people write in and we put them in the office here. it was natural for us to do. what a bunch of articles and then we got into just books that we like, you know, ave i you can sell the menu of a website in which you can advertise them all the time. so we've done five or six books. the latest one is and times which is out this month. it is about the death of the fourth estate. we've got a book, how the irish invented slang, which i think will be a very important book, big event because it just shows that much of american slang

comes from english. things like poker and jazz. it's a really hole hidden part of american language. there's like three words from a reddish in america today. it's complete nonsense. millions and millions of irish people came to america speaking irish. the worst in galway, they just translated into america. danny is the first person who has gone through its methodically and shown how many of these words in the american language and slang is pretty much straight irish gaelic. we've got saul landau's book about gore vidal. we are pretty radical around here. we don't think the democratic party is the answer to everything.

with a dimes worth of difference before the last election, basically saying there isn't really a dimes worth of difference and many of these between the parties, it got a lot of democrats pretty mad. so we occupy a definite side and i would want to say niche because niche always seems to me very small. but i think we figure we are pretty large and when people say we're more alike than the democratic party then we are the republicans, that's counterpunch. come over here and you can learn a lot about life in the world here at i thought of journalism thinking of my father waking up in the morning. and i was a different era. i mean, i grew up with hot metal tubs and newspapers. and my dad was a writer, a great writer and we're going to publish his